Start by verifying ownership of your domain or URL prefix through DNS, HTML file upload, or tag manager. Once verified, you get access to five core sections: Performance shows clicks, impressions, average position, and CTR for every query and page over the last 16 months. Coverage reveals indexing errors, warnings, valid pages, and exclusions—this is where you fix crawl blocks, noindex tags, or redirect chains. URL Inspection lets you test any URL live to see how Googlebot renders it and request re-indexing after fixes. Sitemaps is where you submit XML sitemaps and monitor submission success rates. Core Web Vitals tracks LCP, FID, and CLS at scale across mobile and desktop. For weekly workflow, filter Performance data by page or query, sort by impressions to find underperforming content with high visibility but low CTR—that's your meta description rewrite list. In Coverage, prioritize errors over warnings; a 404 on a page you want indexed matters more than a soft 404 on a parameter URL. Use the URL Inspection tool after publishing new pages or fixing technical issues to accelerate indexing instead of waiting days for natural recrawl. Watch out for sampling and date-range quirks. Performance data updates with a two-day lag, and comparing non-overlapping periods can mislead you. Coverage sometimes flags valid exclusions as problems, like paginated pages blocked in robots.txt by design. At Ottawa SEO, we export Performance data monthly to Google Sheets for historical tracking beyond the 16-month limit and cross-reference Coverage errors with Screaming Frog crawls to catch issues GSC misses, like orphan pages with zero internal links. Set up email alerts for critical Coverage spikes so you catch manual actions or sudden deindexing fast. The Mobile Usability and Enhancements sections matter less unless you run a news site or have specific structured data, but check them quarterly to avoid missing schema errors that kill rich results.